Souchou, Yao
(2018)
Book Review: The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small, Distant War.
International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS), 14 (2).
pp. 191-194.
ISSN ISSN: 1823-6243
Abstract
The book is an attempt by an anthropologist of Malaysian origin presently
teaching in Sydney to make sense of the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960)
by looking at the event from a Marxist perspective. For most Malaysians who
are used to the ofcial narrative, this approach offers another way of looking
at the same episode in their history by providing an explanation of the failed
communist (socialist) revolution in Malaya. Coming from Kuala Lumpur, a
petty bourgeois background, the author was affected by the Emergency in
many ways just like many of his generation. But unlike others he was attracted
to Marxism while studying at Adelaide University in the 1960s. At the time
and the subsequent decades, the Marxist theory became fashionable among
academics all over the world including Malaysia as it provides an exciting
underpinning of the social sciences. Later the author was drawn to the New
Left ideology of the Frankfurt School and French Marxists like Althusser.
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